“How did you get my number?” asks Timmy Smith, the forgotten hero of Super Bowl XXII.

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Nobody calls him like this, not out of the blue, asking about the greatest Super Bowl performance that many don’t remember. For nearly three decades he has been missing from the public celebration of football’s biggest game. His 204 rushing yards that San Diego night remain a record, and yet his name sits like a typo on top of the list. He rarely makes appearances. He never does interviews. He is barely mentioned as a greatest moment.

Of all the instant stars in 50 years of Super Bowls, none has been cloaked in more mystery than the player who tore through the Denver Broncos on 31 January 1988. It was as if Timmy Smith appeared from nowhere. He was an unknown running back for Washington, making his first start, in, of all places, the Super Bowl. Most of the people watching had no idea who he was. But for one remarkable night he dazzled the world.

He met the president. He did David Letterman. He went from anonymous to legend in a matter of days. Then he was gone, washed out of the NFL just two years later as if he had never been there at all. Other surprise Super Bowl stars like Desmond Howard and David Tyree become annual celebrities. You can see them everywhere this time of year. Somehow Smith got lost in a distant time – a footnote to the night his Washington team-mate Doug Williams became the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl. He’s been hidden ever since.

“I tell him: ‘No one has ever done what you did, and no one knows you did it,’” says Clarence Verdin, one of his closest friends on that Super Bowl team.

Now, over the phone, Timmy Smith’s tone grows soft.

“I was just blessed, let’s put it that way,” he says. “I just was in the right place at the right time.”

He was never supposed to be much in Washington. Coach Joe Gibbs and general manager Bobby Beathard picked him in the fifth round of the 1987 draft to give the team depth. He played on punts and kickoffs, and occasionally took a handoff in games, but mostly he was there for practice – to provide a challenge for the starting defense. He seemed to understand this too, often pushing the other practice players to play as hard as they could in the sessions.

“He was focused that rookie year, very focused,” says Verdin, who shared a brick townhouse that season with Smith and team-mate Reggie Branch in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Virginia. “Timmy could have been a superstar someplace else – he was that good.”

But in the playoffs, Washington’s top running back, George Rogers, was slowed by injuries. Gibbs gave the ball to Smith more in wins over Chicago and Minnesota, and he responded with 66 and 72 yards. It was enough for Gibbs to decide that Smith should start over Rogers in the Super Bowl. Only he didn’t tell the team.

They practiced Super Bowl week as if Rogers would be the lead running back. The depth chart listed him No1 at the position, and to most of the players the fact Rogers would start seemed a certainty. At the week’s media sessions, Smith sat alone, ignored, as reporters gathered around the team’s more famous players.

It wasn’t until late in the week that assistant coach Don Breaux gathered the running backs in a room and said: “We’re going to start Timmy.”

“I couldn’t sleep the night before the game,” Smith recalls. “I got up at one in the morning and was just walking around. I wanted to visualize what was going to go on.”

That day, Gibbs had moved the team from their San Diego hotel to the more secluded Lawrence Welk Resort, hoping to eliminate distractions. The sidewalks of the resort were dark and empty as Smith strolled past the small houses imagining the game he would play later that day. In the stillness he saw everything. He pictured great holes opening before him, gaps of green turf flying beneath his feet. He imagined the Broncos defenders in orange jerseys lunging toward him as he dodged their arms and raced down the field.

He saw touchdowns in the empty night. He saw himself standing in the Denver endzone, the roar of the crowd spilling all around him. He even saw himself breaking Marcus Allen’s rushing record, ironically set just four years before against Washington.

“I’m going to have the best game of my life,” Smith remembers telling himself. Then he went back to his room, crawled into bed and fell fast asleep.

All that next day, he couldn’t wait for the game. He was certain it was going to be big. The offensive line, nicknamed the Hogs, had been dominant that year. He knew the play, and his late-night walk filled him with the hope that he was going to do great things. He was so sure he was going to be good he even told his brother that if he won the MVP award that night, he would give him the car they present to the winner.

Then the game started, and everything happened just as he imagined on his midnight walk. The Hogs did open wide, gaping holes, and he burst through them. He raced free into the Broncos backfield, several times sprinting past Denver’s free safety Tony Lilly, who would never play again in the NFL. He ran for 19 yards, then 58 yards for a touchdown, then another 43 and finally 32 early in the fourth quarter to set up his second score: a four-yard plunge into the end zone.

“After he hit the holes, he seemed to take it to the next level,” Branch says.

“It was an unreal feeling,” Smith says. “You dream about it since elementary school and stuff. We were winning the Super Bowl! I couldn’t believe this – it really happened.”

Late in the game, after Smith had passed Allen, George Rogers finally got into the game. He had three carries for 12 yards and would never play in the NFL again. There seemed little doubt in the San Diego twilight who Washington’s next great running back would be. The future was Timmy Smith’s.

And then it wasn’t.

“What happened after that?” Smith asks. “That’s a good question. I don’t know what happened, man.”

Perhaps he was doomed the moment his agent called Washington general manager Bobby Beathard a few days after the Super Bowl, and demanded to be the highest-paid running back in the game. There were also reports at the time that the team felt Smith had lost his focus, that he was spending too much time in Washington’s nightclubs, celebrating his new fame. Beathard complained about this to Smith’s agent, and Gibbs quickly soured on his Super Bowl star.

“Timmy was a fun-loving guy, and he wanted to enjoy himself. Let’s put it that way,” Branch says. “What I had gotten caught up in was that golf thing. I would go out and play golf every chance I could. Timmy never got into playing no golf.”

The future seemed to be Timmy Smith’s – but it never worked out that way. Photograph: Focus On Sport/Getty Images

In an open innuendo that would never be permitted in today’s media culture, reports circulated that Smith was using cocaine. He repeatedly denied the allegations, and there was never any evidence to support the claims, but the more the story was repeated, the farther he seemed to fall with the team he had helped to a championship.

He began the 1988 season as Washington’s top running back, and ran for more than 100 yards in two of the team’s first three games. But things had changed. The magic of that January night in San Diego was gone. He struggled to run past players the way he did in the Super Bowl. By midseason, Gibbs replaced him with Jamie Morris, and at the end of the year the team left him unprotected in Plan B free agency, essentially telling him they no longer wanted him.

“I know I was doing the best that I could,” Smith says. “I don’t know what made Coach Gibbs put Jamie in. And they were saying: ‘Timmy, you’re going to become a free agent.’ I was like: wow. I went to San Diego after that and it was all downhill from there, bro.”

Ankle injures kept him from ever playing with the Chargers. He went to Dallas in 1990, got six yards on six carries in the opening game and was cut. He tried something called the Professional Spring Football League and even played briefly in the Canadian Football League, but the CFL’s rules were strange, and the fit wasn’t right.

“I gave it my best shot, but three downs – I couldn’t do that,” he says with a laugh.

The player who had come from nowhere to be a Super Bowl star was done with football at 28. And to the world that watched him tear through the Broncos, it was like he vanished. He worked, for a time, as a personal trainer in Dallas before moving to Colorado, where he took a job as a counselor at a juvenile correctional facility. On the side, he did some coaching.

Then came the arrest. On 30 September 2005, federal drug enforcement officers said Smith tried to sell cocaine to an undercover agent. He and his brother, Chris, were charged with attempting to distribute drugs. Suddenly he was news again. The DEA’s special agent in charge boasted in a public announcement, declaring in a press release: “The Timmy Smiths of the world are not immune from greed, nor are they immune from being held accountable for contributing to the degradation of our communities.”

The player who had come from nowhere only to disappear was suddenly news again. Several weeks later he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He will not explain what happened other than to call the moment “the stupidest mistake.”

“Anyone who wants to read about it can read it on the internet,” he says. “It’s right there.”

He pauses for a moment. Then he continues.

“The thing about it is … I wasn’t the first to get it, and I won’t be the last to get it,” he says. “Guys make mistakes. It’s all about what you do after that. You try to move on and be a productive citizen. You still have to be a role model. I was an embarrassment to my team-mates and my family. I’m a much better person for going through that. You got to build it back.

“I chose to face my problems by coming out in public and saying: ‘I have nothing to hide.’”

For the last eight years, Timmy Smith has been working in oilfields. Every couple weeks, he packs a bag, leaves his wife at their home outside Denver and travels to woebegone towns on the plains of Texas and New Mexico. He stays for days. His employer is an energy company that sends him out to work with smaller drilling companies. They work in what is called “backflow” – extracting excess fluid from wells.

The job, he says, is hard. The winter days are cold and the summers hot. It can be a lonely existence, being away for so long, but the pay is decent, and the work is steady.

“I’m trying to keep my head above the water,” he says.

He could have been broken by his arrest, but he refuses to complain. To his friends from the Super Bowl team, he’s still the same happy, laughing voice on the phone, jokingly calling Rogers “Second String” and teasing Williams about the game MVP that went to the quarterback and not to him.

“What I like about him is he has a high spirit, man,” says Verdin, who now lives in New Orleans. “He never wavered. There are guys around here who if they had gone through what he went through they would have hit rock bottom. He called me a couple of times from prison and he said: ‘I made a mistake.’ He was positive. I said: ‘Dude, how are you staying so positive?’

“That’s why I’m so proud of him.”

Over the phone, Smith says the other workers on the oilfields know who he is, that they are aware that the man working beside them on the barren terrain was once one of the biggest stars in football’s biggest game. Maybe a few of them have watched the highlights of Washington’s win that night, perhaps they even saw him spin a football in front of Letterman and hear the host joke about Smith’s role with Washington, “where you only play one game a year. Not a bad gig”.

Guys make mistakes. It’s all about what you do after that

Timmy Smith

On Super Bowl Sundays he goes to a local bar to watch the game. He does this whether he is home or in some lost oilfield town. He says the people there know who he is, too. Undoubtedly, when people at the bar learn they are in the presence of a Super Bowl star, the holder of one of the game’s biggest records, they will have questions. What was it like? How did it feel?

A few years ago, Verdin started to ask Smith about the record. They wondered who might surpass it, if anyone, until finally Smith looked at him.

“I don’t want anyone to break the record,” he said.

“That’s right. You can go to the grave with a game like that,” Verdin replied.

Every once in a while Smith says he will see something on television about great Super Bowl moments, and he will catch a glimpse of himself dashing across the field in San Diego, his white jersey with the No36 shaking as he cuts around the Broncos players. He is surprised his feat never gets more attention. It’s been 27 years, and no one has come close. Other, more famous, running backs are celebrated despite having lesser games. His record has become an anomaly forever draped with conditions:

The Hogs were so good …

If Rogers had been healthy …

Williams took the pressure off by throwing for 340 yards …

“They try to play it down on TV and say: ‘Oh, it was (the) No7 or No8 [best running performance],” he says. “But who else ran for 204 yards? They try to say it was a fluke. OK, maybe it was a fluke.

“But it happened.”

And that’s enough for the man who came from nowhere to rise, and fall, and climb back up once again.